Record-breaking DDoS attack strikes CloudFlare's network

A record-breaking distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) hit CloudFlare's data centers in Europe and the U.S., according to a report on Gigaom.

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said in a Twitter post Monday evening that the attack exceeded 400 gigabits per second, which means it was one ugly attack perhaps slowing things down even off the company's content delivery network.

Whoever was behind the attack was using a new tactic that exploits network time protocol (NTP) servers to slow things down. This new way to target networks is being used more frequently, Prince said.